Of course as soon as you start to look there are lines and grids everywhere – these are some from my Flickr photos:

1. lobster pot, 2. bramble leaves turning, 3. patterns and textures at Jolyons, 4. nets at Praia da Vagueira, 5. lines in rock, 6. sculpted by nature, 7. rusty fence, 8. light and waves, 9. fibre and tines, 10. prints in the sand, 11. patterns and textures at Jolyons, 12. netted rock, 13. under a sunlit chair, 14. creel, 15. waves, 16. grass shadows on the sand

I also think there are lots of expressions about lines to play with, e.g. ‘crossing the line’,'line of enquiry’,'taking a hard line’, and probably also some about grids though they don’t spring to mind so readily!

I had the fabrics (and had already used most of them in the woven napkin rings).

I had the words, collected in my theme book. And I had – just – the time.

Piece, piece, piece and stitch, stitch, stitch.

A day later – much later – and I had a table runner. The fabrics are all my own hand dyed indigo shibori pieces from various workshops long past. (Now I need to dye some more!). The text includes words from the Bible and quotations from Christine D Pohl’s Making Room and Jennifer Kavanagh’s The O of Home. I had puzzled about how to attribute these if I’d stitched them on a napkin; in this format it was easy, with a label on the back of the work.

So this is it, the culmination of all the work and experimenting and agonising and learning. The photos were taken in a bit of a hurry and a bad light before it all went into the package to catch the post (you have to get to the sorting office by mid-morning here, as the mail goes on the plane to Glasgow at lunchtime). When it comes back from my tutor I’ll take some better pictures and put them on Flickr.

There isn’t really anything I would change about it, a few small technical things maybe. I don’t think I’m really cut out for distance learning but I’m glad I stuck with the course and managed to finish with something I like. I couldn’t have got through this last week without the large amounts of encouragement and coffee provided by Alan, he was wonderful. I’m off for a walk by the sea now, and the next big thing is Woolfest – I can’t wait. I’ll be there both days and would love to say hello to any blogging friends who are going.

Soooo… back to the theme book to pick up on another of my early ideas – a set of napkins in napkin rings. Napkin rings are physically the perfect shape to embody both the embracing, enclosing aspect of the circle and the openness I was trying to convey. Embroidering text onto napkins would mean that it could be rolled up and half hidden, to be revealed in the act of opening the napkin and preparing to eat. “Hospitality can begin a journey towards visibility and respect” (Making Room, Christine D Pohl).

I still wanted a non-matching set, and at first I thought about making each napkin ring in a different way. I looked at various textile napkin rings and cuffs on Flickr, at how they were constructed and fastened. I sampled a quilted ring using indigo fabric, and I thought about weaving and embroidering, and I thought that they wouldn’t be a non-matching set but would just look as if I’d tried to include every textile technique I ever used! As Tim Gunn says, “Edit, edit”.

I thought about the cards I had wrapped with fabric and how exciting they were. I looked at my pile of blue and white fabrics from around the world, and my indigo shibori fabrics which include a few overdyed colours as well as much blue and white, and I decided to weave the napkin rings, all on the same warp, in fabrics using a free Saori style. Each one would start with a slightly different base point – Ghanaian batik, Indian block prints, sari silk, Javanese batik, and shibori, refecting cultural diversity. Indigo, forms of which are used in so many countries, would link them all together.

So I warped my little loom (for the first time!) and wove. I had been thinking about numbers, having decided that I wanted an odd number, as more in keeping with my theme, I settled on 5, since 7 is supposed to symbolise perfection and I didn’t want that. Thanks goodness, I would never have completed 7 in time!

I found the perfect napkins on Ebay, all the same size, all white damask, but each with a different pattern. I love that they are used, not pristine, and have their own hidden stories, if they could only tell. On each one I wrote, with stitch, the words of a detainee held at Yarl’s Wood, a UK detention centre for asylum seekers, a place which epitomises the very opposite of hospitality – a scandalous place where traumatised women and children are made prisoners. Yarl’s Wood Befrienders go to visit and support the detainees, and the words are taken from their web site, with permission. They are very moving. I stitched them over and over in shades of blue, moving from pale to dark, to reflect something of the “journey towards visibility”.

So I should be done, at this point. But no, that really is something else in the background. In a moment of mania I decided, not for the sake of the assignment, but for the sake of the work, that it wasn’t complete. I’d wanted to incorporate some of the snippets of text that I had jotted down throughout my theme book, but I hadn’t wanted to mix them up with the words of the detainees, detracting from both. So I was thinking hard about how to include them in the piece in a way that was continuous with the rest and added to the whole, and what I did is the next instalment…

This is where I had got to by 24th May:

Based on this I started to play with design ideas in my theme book. Because I planned to use nuno felt techniques I had a dyeing day to lay in a good stock of sheer blue fabrics; and I gathered together all the blue and white fabric/yarn/fibre and paper I could find.

I then made some felt samples. I began by making a couple of plain mats using different fibres – Shetland, Blue-faced Leicester, and one that was a mix of those two with some Merino. I decided to go with the BFL, which has a lovely textured surface when felted.

I also bought some sample packs of African, Javanese and Indian fabrics online (from The African Fabric Shop, Textile Techniques, and the lovely Glitz and Pieces on Etsy). I looked at some beautiful indigo textiles from Japan and Hungary as well, but they only came in big pieces, way beyond my budget.

These are the ideas for circles on felt that I recorded in my theme book. I was thinking that they should all be open in some way, circles without edges, to symbolise that within this enclosing shape, no one is shut out.

Meanwhile, I wrote to the Yarl’s Wood Befrienders who kindly gave permission for me to use the words of detainees from their web site.

I must admit I sometimes avoid looking outward very far, for fear that I’ll find someone else doing just what I’m doing. I have had that experience once or twice, and I know it’s happened to other people too. I don’t mean copying – I mean that strange phenomenon where several people in far-flung places all start doing the same thing at the same time.

But, how important is that desire to be different? We have this strange Western obsession with originality (or I do anyway). Yet my most treasured comments are when someone has said my work inspires them – which I take to mean that something about it passes into their work or their way of seeing. And I don’t actually mind if people copy something I’ve done, if it’s in order to learn something or take something further – not in a commercial context, and I hope not without acknowledging it! As much as I can, I try to share my processes as I go along anyway. So I should surely take off those anxious blinkers and pay more conscious attention to who might be inspiring me, whether it’s in technique or style or philosophy. As my tutor says, ‘No-one works in a vacuum.”

So thanks, Julie, for mentioning Alice Kettle’s recent Place Settings series – it set me off on a trail of discovery. Here’s one of Alice Kettle’s collaborative pieces with Helen Felcey. There are more on her website under the ‘New Proj’ heading. I think these pieces are absolutely beautiful, lovely lines that move between the cloth and the ceramics, delicate shimmery spoons and cups set against the scribbly textures of Alice Kettle’s embroidery.

A search for place settings in art led me to some other works too. One was Judy Chicago’s famous piece “The Dinner Party“. I had read about this celebration of the lives of women throughout time before, but the power of the web means it’s now accessible in a 3D tour where you can virtually wander round the table. Quite awe-inspiring in its scale and execution, even just on-screen.

The second piece I found is a work in progress – also a large-scale installation – weaver Eleanor Pritchard’s Place Setting. This will be at Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, from 12 June – 26 September 2010. Eleanor Pritchard says the work is ‘essentially a project about dining’ – her guest list includes all kinds of people from aristocrats to nursery maids. I’m glad I recorded the idea of narrative stitched into napkins in my ‘hospitality’ theme book before I found this site – that originality thing again! One of my ideas for the hospitality piece was to machine embroider the words of asylum seekers, their responses to receiving welcome, as white words on white fabric, ‘hidden away’, ‘revealed in the opening up of a napkin at the beginning of a meal’, ‘hard to read but if you look they are there’. I decided on placemats, not napkins, in the end, and I may not use the writing idea (though it’s still in the mix) but the uncanny similarity of intention remains. Eleanor Pritchard’s embroidered stories are central to her installation and will reflect the lives and narratives of her guests in 24 damask napkins. That is just a part of this work, which I think is going to be amazing and well worth a visit if you are within reach.

The last piece I found, which again has some elements in common with my theme, is not a large public work, rather a personal gift, but public nonetheless by virtue of being on Flickr – Samantha’s lovely, quirky set of 6 ‘mismatched placemats‘ for a wedding anniversary gift. If I tell you I had already decided that my ‘hospitality’ piece would be 6 mismatched placemats and that they would be blue and white, you may guess that I did indeed start to feel a bit worried at this point! In fact the resemblance ends there and is actually quite incidental, but it does show that very few ideas are really unique – however hard you strive to be ‘original’. So I think I’ll stop fretting about that and just enjoy the connections!

Speaking of enjoying connections, I occasionally make a Flickr gallery, it’s easy to do and a great way of collecting some lovely and interesting work together in a complementary way. With blue and white very much on my mind, here are two to share with you: blue and white cloth and blue and white cloth 2. I hope they make up for the lack of pictures in this post!

I liked the result of wrapping with fabric a lot so I made another, this time just working with the colours in the fabrics. When it was done I realised that the sketch book page on which I’d used up my left-over paint would make just the right background for it!

Wrapping is often used solely as a design exercise but an artist here on Tiree has made it into her own very distinctive art form. Susan Woodcock creates evocative seascapes and landscapes, full of colour and movement, combining paint and textiles in a way that perfectly captures the island atmosphere. Her husband Colin Woodcock, is also an artist, a painter whose work explores ‘the interplay of land, sea and sky’, and is filled with the beautiful light that is so special to Tiree. Together they run the Blue Beyond Gallery, where Colin also creates his dramatic raku pottery. Every week in summer you can go to watch the pots being fired – a fascinating process – and very hot!

1, 2, 3, 4

The next exercise asked you to construct a grid, but I used a ‘found’ one – a pallet from one of Alan’s beachcombing expeditions and added verticals of rough macramé jute to weave through and tie to. I wanted something in keeping with the materials I was planning to use to create this textile structure – rope, twine, scraps of balloons from an old celebration, fragments of net, shells, seaweed – the randomness cast up by the tide on a Tiree beach. There’s a little white fleece from the fences there too, and a little dark Hebridean fleece brought back from this woolly place on Mull across the water.

There are some detail shots of the different sections here.

I’d love, one day, to see this beach twine sculpture on the island of Gigha. I did see this dramatic figure at Machir Bay on Islay a few years ago. I love coming across unexpected art like this.

I decided to work with a combination of wool tapestry and cloth rya knotting that could evoke both rag trees and clothes lines. I auditioned various yarns for the tapestry but decided to spin my own in the end. I was trying to achieve a spacious meditative feel for the background, blending colours of sky, clouds and leaves.

Each scrap of fabric knotted into the tapestry has meaning for me, associated either with a person, an idea, or a memory. I like the result overall but I would change some of the sizes of the pieces, as I don’t think the balance is quite right – I was trying to create the kind of wildness you see in a rag tree, and if several neighbouring pieces are too similar in size it looks like a fringe and that freedom is lost. This happens in the third line down, which is the one I’m least happy with – it also breaks the rhythm of the diagonals and I think the line should be less horizontal. I was trying to create some variety in the diagonals but that one looks stolid instead of dynamic. I like the way some of the fabrics fray and curl up – this creates the ‘alive’ feeling I was hoping for. I photographed the piece outside where the wind could touch the cloth to emphasise this.

I’m not sure whether the piece works in the end or is just too literal. I wanted it to be abstract and symbolic more than representational. What do people think? I couldn’t have made it any bigger as that was limited by the size of my frame, but I wonder if it would have been stronger at a larger scale. Technically there are problems with ridges in the weaving which I think comes from using a simple frame with a single shed stick; and I would need to do a lot more weaving to find out why it twists in opposite directions at top and bottom.

I’ve also been working on my theme book for the final assignment of the course, which has an absolute deadline of 16th June. My theme is ‘hospitality’, thinking particularly about asylum and sanctuary for all kinds of people who might not be made welcome by everyone. After reading a little piece in Country Living about ‘How to Lay the Perfect Table’ I decided to focus on ‘How to Lay the Imperfect Table’. These are some of the pages from my theme book. Most of what I’ve done so far is playing with the ideas but I’m ready to start sampling now.

This is my first sampler, trying several different techniques, and a limited range of yarns – some plain tapestry wools (not rug yarn but the kind sold for needlepoint) and some Noro yarn. I’m trying to use up some of the materials I have already, to overcome a bad habit of always feeling I need the ‘right thing’ to hand.

The next exercise was to create something expressive using a range of different materials; I was thinking fire or more specifically ‘deep into his fiery heart, he took the dust of Joan of Arc’ (from a Leonard Cohen song I’m listening to a lot right now). This one includes combinations of fibres and found materials – sari ribbon, embroidery threads, polythene bags and plastic netting, video tape, wire, handspun yarn, cord, torn fabrics, net, beads, knitting yarns and tapestry wools. I’m noticing I lean towards working on quite a fine scale.

The third exercise was to use rya knotting in addition to the tapestry weaving, to create texture. Again the scale is small, and this uses handspun, plastic bags, net, silk and novelty yarn, inspired by the sea.

The final sample involves choosing a word from a list and working a sample based on a storyboard. At least, they call it a storyboard but that means something different to me – I think what’s wanted is what I think of as a design board. I chose the word ’sacred’ and as I’ve recently been reading Kathleen Norris’s ‘The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Women’s Work’ that seemed like a good place to start. Clothes lines led on to prayer trees and also reminded me of this TIF Challenge piece on memory. Here’s the design board – the weaving is still in progress.

two sheets of painted card interwoven

cutting the paper weft into curves

magazine page woven with scrunched tissue paper

adding diagonal lines

weaving strips of a plastic bag

I like the middle one because of the texture and the way the weft breaks up the image; and the bottom one, with the effects of transparency, and the fragments of words.